Christmas had been getting longer – until now

The comment editor of a US newspaper called just now, chasing a review that's due next week. His office was operating at full strength: there's no question of taking Boxing Day off where he works, let alone extra days if Christmas happens to fall at a weekend.

This practice of treating the period between Christmas and New Year as a semi-official holiday is one that has crept up on us during my working life. We Britons have quickly become used to it, as have many Europeans, but it puzzles the Cousins.

Mark Steyn, the one-man Anglosphere news service, has reposted some observations he made in the Irish Times in 2004, when 25 December again coincided with a weekend and so triggered a spate of knock-on Bank Holidays:

The French and Germans, who average 40 days holiday a year, assume the reason Americans don't take holidays is because they don't get them. In fact, it's very hard persuading them to take the ones they do get. In rural states, most Federal holidays – Presidents Day, Martin Luther King Day, etc – go unobserved except by banks and government agencies. It's all I can do to persuade my assistant not to come in on Christmas Day – "just for a couple of hours in the morning in case there's anything urgent," she says pleadingly. "There won't be anything urgent," I scoff. "Those deadbeats at The Irish Times won't be back in the office till the week before Valentine's Day."

The last thing I want is to be a Scrooge. I love this time of year. I'm as moved as the next chap by the sight of children unwrapping presents. I was dashing away tears yesterday as I watched my nine-year-old singing and playing Ave Maria on the organ. Turkey, trees, tinsel, trashy TV: bring it all on.

It's just that if we want to take more and more time off, we have to earn it. The West's present economic troubles are easily enough explained. For decades, we have been increasing consumption without commensurate increases in production, and bridging the difference with borrowing. But there is no law of nature that says children in Manila must work long hours on paltry salaries so that children in Mannheim can unwrap cheap electric toys. There was always bound to be a moment when the debts were called in, and we seem to have reached that moment now.

Until recently, each generation in the West had more leisure time than the previous one – an improvement in quality of life based on invention and, even more, on specialisation. Now, though, it is based largely on debt.

To repeat my most regularly cited statistic, Western Europe's share of world GDP has declined from 36 per cent in 1974 to 24 per cent today, and will fall to 15 per cent in 2020. This newspaper has just reported that Britain's economy has been overtaken by Brazil's.

In the UK, in the US and in Europe, governments have responded to the downturn by trying to stimulate demand even more. They are prescribing the medicine that sickened the patient. While each dose might give an illusory sense of relief, the underlying malady is worsening. Politicians know it but, rather than facing their electorates with the unpalatable truth, they plunder the one section of the population that can't vote: children.

I don't like it any more than you do, but there's no point in kidding ourselves. The best measure of prosperity is the hours of work we have to do in exchange for the goods or services we want in return. That index had been improving but, in 2011, most of us had to work longer hours for most staples than we did in 2010. One way or another, the imbalances of artificial boom will be corrected. Trying to shuffle off the debts onto generations still unborn is neither moral nor practical.